Mrs Grundy is an extremely conventional or priggish person. This eponym comes from the character named Mrs Grundy in the play Speed the Plough by the British playwright Thomas Morton. Perhaps, the Mrs Grundy of Archie’s Riverdale is also a take-off on this one. Dolly Varden, a character known for her colourful costume in the novel Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, has given her name to a colourfully spotted trout (Salvelinus malma) of North America and Eastern Asia. An efficient, faithful male aide or employee is usually called a Man Friday, after a character in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

When Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, he could hardly have even imagined the range of meaning the name would one day acquire, especially in slang. The range of meaning for Mickey Mouse stretches from unimportant or trivial to irritatingly petty to intellectually unchallenging or simple. Anything that is blandly sentimental is also termed a Mickey Mouse piece. And, it is also used for popular compositions and performers or a soundtrack that accompanies the action in an unsubtle or melodramatic way suggestive of music written for cartoon films.

In television programmes where competitors figure, the judges are often called the big brothers, the idea being that they would provide guidance and suggestions to the amateur performers. George Orwell used big brother for a character in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Orwellian sense stands preserved in Big Brother, an omnipresent and seemingly benevolent figure who represents the oppressive control exerted by a state, organisation or government over individual lives. In this sense, a Big Brother could be a state, an organisation or a leader. Xanadu, a word for an idyllic, beautiful place owes its origin to Xanadu, a place in S.T. Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan, where Coleridge writes: " In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

Coleridge himself borrowed the toponym of Xanadu from Xandu, the summer home of Kublai Khan. The accounts of Marco Polo’s travels to the East and his description of Kublai Khan’s kingdom created an aura of exotic luxury and grandeur around Xanadu, enticing Coleridge into writing a poem located in Xanadu.